Hearth Display, a family management startup, announced that it has secured $2.8M funding from Female Founders Fund, Stellation VC, Precursor Ventures, Reshma Saujani, Jenny Fleiss, and other strategic individual investors. The latest round brings the company’s total funding to just over $3M in combined VC and angel funding.
How was Hearth Display born?
Mei Lin Ng, Susie Harrison, and Nathalie Stratton founded Hearth Display to simplify modern family life and make parenting teamwork. The trio grew up with superhero, working moms who “did it all,” however they see a different future for themselves where parents have more support.
Combining their unique backgrounds in product development, growth, and ed-tech, the trio has spent the last two years developing and perfecting Hearth Display to solve the Mental Load.
As a result, the company is using a framework inspired by economist and social scientist Diane Elson’s Three R’s:
Reduces: The company reduces the mental load via a centralised hub with software that allows parents to manage chaotic schedules with predictive automation.
Redistribute: The platform makes it easy to redistribute the work across the household through family-wide participation.
Recognition: Throughout the process, there is recognition of the often invisible work it takes to make a family function through visual communication.
How does it work?
The company’s core product is a first-of-its-kind operating system that combines beautiful hardware with software.
Hearth Display says that the interface offers an easy-to-use experience that allows each family member to build and customise their own profile with imagery, routines, calendars, and more.
The software also includes access to the Hearth Helper, a virtual assistant service that will do tasks like uploading invitations or soccer schedules to your family’s Hearth calendar.
The hardware and software combination creates a central hub for the thousands of decisions, tasks, and plans a family makes, giving archaic, disaggregated bulletin boards, to-do lists, and fridge note the boot.
According to the company, the team surveyed and beta-tested with hundreds of parents who have helped build the vision of Hearth every step of the way, and have even tested Hearth in their own homes.
Hearth also relies on the expertise and lived experiences of its trusted advisors – including Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code and The Marshall Plan for Moms, Jenny Fleiss, co-Founder of Rent the Runway as well as Prasanna Swaminathan, CTO and co-founder of Ergatta, and others.
Price and availability
Hearth Display will launch in Summer 2022 for pre-orders at a discounted price of $499 + 2 years of free software subscription. The pre-orders will ship in March 2023 and are eligible for a full refund prior shipping date. Next spring, Hearth will be available click-to-purchase at $699 + $9/month software subscription.
